“Stop fingering me, bro”: Black man sues D.C. cop for invasive search

A 39-year-old black resident of Washington, D.C., is suing a Metropolitan Police officer for subjecting him to an intrusive anal probe as part of routine stop-and-frisk activity.

M.B. Cottingham, a father of three who has worked as an ice cream vendor for the last nine years, was relaxing with friends on lawn chairs on a Wednesday afternoon last September, contemplating how he should celebrate his birthday later that evening, according to the complaint filed by American Civil Liberties Union.

Then two cop cars pulled up, and officers jumped out. They asked Cottingham and his friends, all of whom are black, if they had weapons, per the complaint. They said that they didn’t. The officers noticed an open container of alcohol; Cottingham says he offered to pour it out.

Then Officer Sean Lojacono asked what was in Cottingham’s sock. Cottingham, according to the complaint, pulled out “a small, clear bag containing less than an eighth of an ounce of marijuana – a quantity that a person may legally possess under District law – and placed it on the hood of a nearby car.”

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Cottingham then consented to a pat-down, and turned away, raised his arms and spread his legs.

“Officer Lojacono reached immediately between Mr. Cottingham’s legs, grabbed his scrotum, felt around with his hand, and stuck his thumb in Mr. Cottingham’s anus,” the complaint states. One of Cottingham’s friends recorded the search on his cell phone.

“Stop fingering me, bro,” Cottingham is heard saying.

“I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” said Cottingham in a statement. “It’s bad enough that members of my community are stopped and frisked by the police all the time. I’ve been frisked many times and even beaten by police. But this officer treated me like I’m not even a human being.”

Lojacono contended in an incident report that he was looking for drugs.

This incident and recent others that were caught on video, such as an officer walking into someone’s fenced backyard and carrying out a search, have drawn intense public scrutiny to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s ongoing use of stop and frisk.

An investigation by WUSA9, a local CBS affiliate, analyzed D.C. Department data and found that officers carried out more than 22,887 stop and frisk interactions between 2010 and 2018. Eight out of 10 people who were stopped and frisked by DC police were black, despite comprising of just 47 percent of the city’s population.

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Last week, D.C. City Council’s Public Safety Committee held two public hearings to discuss the police department’s tactics, which critics say disproportionately target black residents. Council members questioned Police Chief Peter Newsham over his department’s policy. He said that he had seen the video showing Cottingham being searched.

“It looked like it was an inappropriate touching by the officer,” Newsham said. “[The officer] has been removed from that particular unit and he has been disciplined for that matter.”

The Metropolitan Police Department declined to comment.

Cover image: YouTube